Columbus funding for homeless programs in jeopardy
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The City of Columbus is working to approve a budget for 2025 and on Tuesday night, council held a hearing on the housing and homelessness spending plan.
City leaders said access to affordable housing is a crisis in central Ohio. Now, money from the federal government due to the COVID-19 pandemic has run out and that’s going to have a big impact on what’s available to city departments, especially for housing and homeless support.
Council President Shannon Hardin said this is the tightest budget he has worked on in 10 years.
"It's really important to have this conversation and for folks to understand what's at stake," Hardin said.
The Community Shelter Board, a non-profit addressing homelessness in Columbus, said it needs a little less than triple its current funding in the proposed budget.
"We are really in a challenging time of trying to figure out how to not only ensure that we have delivery of services for those that are moving through homelessness, but that we have also the right structures to catalyze development of housing," Community Shelter Board President and CEO Shannon Isom said.
Right now, $5.7 million is proposed for homeless prevention in the fiscal year 2025 operating budget. To maintain everything Community Shelter Board does now, board leaders said they would need $13.6 million. To make progress, that number is $18.7 million.
"If we don't do that, the current path we'll see not only that we will be going exactly at the same clip we are doing today, but that we will increase unsheltered homelessness as well as homelessness altogether," Isom said.
Money also comes from Franklin County and business partners and now the conversations center around how to get the funding necessary to continue addressing the housing crisis.
"Funding for keeping people in houses, keeping people off the land, keeping people housed is about life and death, and we can either fund and hold and get better or we cannot, and it will grow. And I think that those are just the choices that we as a community have to make," Hardin said.
Council has a few more budget hearings and is working on amendments right now. The goal is to approve the budget in the next four to six weeks.